Analysed under the microscope, the bread samples showed tell-tale signs of grinding, sieving and kneading.

Dr Amaia Arranz-Otaegui of the University of Copenhagen, who discovered the remains of the bread, said it was the last thing they expected to find at the site.

“Bread is a powerful link between our past and present food cultures,” she said. “It connects us with our prehistoric ancestors.”

The bread would have been made in several stages, including “grinding cereals and club-rush tubers to obtain fine flour, mixing of flour with water to produce dough, and baking the dough in the hot ashes of a fireplace or in a hot flat-stone”, she explained.

Jordanian bread recipe from 14,000 years ago

Make flour from wild wheat and wild barley

Pound tubers (roots) of wild plants that grow in water (sedges or club- or bull-rushes) to a dry pulp

Mix together with water to make a batter or dough

Bake on hot stones around a fire.

The people living in the area at the time were hunter gatherers. They would have hunted gazelle and trapped smaller animals such as hares and birds.

They also foraged for plant foods such as nuts, fruits and wild cereals.

The researchers think the bread was made when people gathered together for a celebration or feast.

This happened before the advent of farming, when people started growing cereal crops and keeping animals.

Image copyrightAlexis PantosImage captionThe fireplace where the bread was found at an archaeological site known as Shubayqa 1

This raises the intriguing possibility that growing cereals for bread may have been the driving force behind farming.

“The significance of this bread is that it shows investment of extra effort into making food that has mixed ingredients,” said Prof Fuller. “So, making some sort of a recipe, and that implies that bread played a special role for special occasions.

“That in turn suggests one of the possible motivations as to why people later chose to cultivate and domesticate wheat and barley, because wheat and barley were species that already had a special place in terms of special foods.”

Related Articles

Image copyright Getty ImagesImage caption Hollywood has rather overstated the reputation of today’s piranhas Scientists have unearthed the fossilised remains of a piranha-like species that they say is the earliest known example of a flesh-eating fish. This bony creature, found in South Germany, lived about 150 million years ago and had the distinctive sharp teeth […]

Image copyright NAtional GeographicImage caption The series Mars envisages how a pioneer human settlement might function on the Red Planet To mark the second season of the television series Mars, Hollywood director Ron Howard talked to the BBC about creating a realistic depiction of the first human colonies on the Red Planet. If humankind is […]

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionThese chicken nuggets were grown in a lab from cells taken from a living animal There’s a looming crisis over the world’s growing appetite for meat. Could a chicken running around a farmyard in San Francisco hold the key to a solution? In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted […]